Paper 2010/439

Embedded Extended Visual Cryptography Schemes

Feng Liu and Chuankun Wu

Abstract

Visual cryptography scheme (VCS) is a kind of secret sharing scheme which allows the encoding of a secret image into n shares that distributed to n participants. The beauty of such scheme is that a set of qualified participants is able to recover the secret image without any cryptographic knowledge and computation devices. Extended visual cryptography scheme (EVCS) is a kind of VCS which consists of meaningful shares (compared to the random shares of traditional VCS). In this paper, we propose a construction of EVCS which is realized by embedding random shares into meaningful covering shares, and we call it the embedded extended visual cryptography scheme (embedded EVCS). Experimental results compare some of the well-known EVCS's proposed in recent years systematically, and show that the proposed embedded EVCS has competitive visual quality compared with many of the well-known EVCS's in the literature. Besides, it has many specific advantages against these well-known EVCS's respectively.

Note: The paper was first submitted in 2006, and has been reviewed for several times. During the reviewing procedure, many anonymous reviewers' comments are very valuable. We thank a lot to these anonymous reviewers.